


Fundamentally Loathsome

by sinaddict



Category: Point Pleasant
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-25
Updated: 2010-10-25
Packaged: 2017-10-12 21:23:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/129224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinaddict/pseuds/sinaddict
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every once in a while, Christina enlists Boyd in the cruelest game possible, the one Judy can never resist, even when she <i>knows</i> she's being played.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fundamentally Loathsome

And I am resigned to this wicked fucking world on its way to hell.  
The living are dead and I hope to join them, too.  
I know what to do and I do it well...

 

i.

The memories take her over with little notice, most of the time.

She spends hours in the locker room of an abandoned small-town gym that miraculously still has enough water pressure for a shower, scrubbing her skin with pruning fingers until the steam blurs her vision—the steam, not tears, never tears for _her_ , not anymore—and all she can see is the angry pink-red of fresh, cleansing burns and scrapes.

The imprint of Christina's fingers around her wrist is still there, the faint reddish-purple stain of nightmares that won't wash away. _Her_ symbol, seared into Judy's skin over the pulse point.

(Once, back before the churches were reduced to rubble and ashes, Judy held her wrist over a prayer candle, staring up at the statue of the Virgin Mary holding Baby Jesus as the flames licked yellow-orange over the mark until the scent of charred skin drew the attention of a horrified priest. She awoke the next day with her wrist smooth and unmarked, the symbol untouched.)

Sighing as the shower sputters and the water cuts off, she steps out, the tile cool and slick beneath her bare, unmarked feet. She doesn't have to look in the mirror to know any marks from last night's fight have disappeared and her skin is smooth and unblemished again.

It's almost more of a mark of Cain than the symbol Christina branded across her wrist.

 

ii.

Boyd shows up in the doorway of the abandoned, boarded-up property Judy has taken up residence in for the time being. Utterly impeccable, Boyd surveys the surroundings with distaste and steps carefully around a dead rat as he says, "At least when you go evil, we provide protection from pest infestations."

"You are a pest infestation," Judy replies, trying for acerbic to keep up appearances, but coming off more fatigued. It's been months since she allowed herself the comfort of human contact, and no matter how much she hates Boyd, she can be reasonably certain that Christina won't—or can't—kill the man just for interacting with her. "What do you want now, Boyd?"

He smirks, that know-it-all smirk that makes her fingers itch for a gun to shoot him with. It never does more than slow him down, but watching him wince when the bullets hit is one of the few pleasures she has left. "Have you seen Christina?"

The question makes her want to raise an eyebrow, but she learned long ago that it's always safer to hide any reaction from Boyd. Her tone utterly blasé, she feigns disinterest as she sharpens the blade of her knife, the only weapon she has left after leaving the gun with the last group of survivors she came across. "Not since the last time she tracked me down and unleashed a plague on the survivors I was with."

She'd learned her lesson that time.

She avoids survivors now, only passing through to leave weapons and food where they'll find it.

"Huh," Boyd snaps his fingers and an ornate chair that could probably be called a throne appears to her left, alongside an old-fashioned chaise lounge and footstool. "You know, this place reminds me of my first apartment. More spacious, of course, but the same general…" he trails off as he looks around with distaste. "Ambiance."

Rolling her eyes, she tucks the knife into the back pocket of her tattered, worn jeans and says, "Please tell me we don't have the kind of relationship where nostalgic rambling is okay. Try to remember I hate your guts and if either of us could actually kill each other, we wouldn't even bother talking."

"Now, Judy, that's just not true," Boyd leans forward in his chair, elbows resting against his thighs and chin atop his clasped hands as he glances at the controlled bonfire she's set up in the middle of the room. The flames flare higher, brighter, illuminating the broken floor boards and exposed wall beams. Roaches scurry away from the increased light before they too burst into flames, sparking like grounded fireflies. "I like you just fine now that you aren't trying to interfere with Chris's destiny."

"She's all yours," Judy ignores the plush carpeting appearing beneath her feet as the harsh shadows and flickering light is replaced with the glow of a soft chandelier overhead. A huge, wrought-iron bed frame appears in the corner, topped with a mattress covered in heavy, embroidered fabrics and pillows, the likes of which Judy hasn't seen since her parents were still alive. "Please, keep her. And I don't need this to be a motherfucking mansion."

Boyd chuckles. The room still looks like something out of a Moroccan brothel as he says rather sardonically, "You don't need this to be a motherfucking hovel, either. You can wallow in your teenage angst just as easily in stylish surroundings."

"As much as I love these little chats, let's cut the bullshit. What the fuck do you want from me now?"

All amusement draining from his expression, Boyd stalks over to her, his fingers tucking one lank lock of hair behind her ear before sliding down to caress her jaw, a parody of that moment so long ago that it all keeps coming back to, that moment where Christina chose her as the one. "Christina is in one of her moods. If she shows up here, you _will_ contact me to come get her."

There's only one kind of mood Christina gets in that concerns Boyd enough for him to drop the charming rogue act. Judy ruthlessly quashes down the glimmer of hope at the thought that Christina might be trying to be good again. Even when Christina tries, it never ends well.

Instead of reacting, she just asks, "How do I contact you?"

 

iii.

She knows better, she really does.

This is not the first time Christina has shown up on her doorstep—so to speak, of course, since there's no actual door and the rubble doesn't exactly make for a staircase—with a tear-streaked face and trembling hands.

She knows better, but she still steps to the side and inclines her head, inviting Christina in.

"I don't," Christina says, faltering with the stop-and-start rhythm of her pacing, seemingly oblivious to the squalor of her surroundings. She's always been oblivious to her surroundings where Judy's concerned, ignoring infested abandoned warehouses and stripped suburban homes with equal disinterest. She's dressed down in a pair of jeans and a simple white camisole smudged with reddish-brown stains that Judy chooses to believe are the iron-oxide clay of the southwest. "I don't know—I didn't mean… oh, my God, I'm so sorry, Jude."

She knows better, but every muscle in her body screams to go to Christina, to wrap both arms around her and promise she'll help make everything good again. Instead, she stays stoic, arms folded across her chest as she stares across the bonfire at the girl she was once closer to than her real sister. (She never thought she'd be so happy that Isabelle killed herself as she was when she realized that at least Christina couldn't use her sister against her, too.) "What happened, Christina?" she asks dispassionately, watching Christina in her peripheral vision as she uses a stick to turn over the pieces of wood and detritus to keep the fire going.

Christina's face crumples, tears sliding down her cheeks, and Judy's always wondered how somebody with so much evil inside her could look so transcendentally beautiful, so angelic when she cries. "I wanted to save her," she murmurs quietly, reaching out and holding one hand into the fire, watching as the flames curl around her skin. (They both learned a long time ago that nothing on earth can touch Christina that way anymore.) "I tried, but Boyd…" she trails off, shaking her head. "There was this little girl."

And so Judy sits, listens, as Christina haltingly explains about trying to save a starving, orphaned four-year-old from the latest pandemic; she didn't know the name, but Judy deduced from her description of the symptoms—vivid hallucinations, paranoia, loss of touch with reality—that it was what the survivors call Psycho Pox. Christina talks about spending weeks trying to nurse the kid back to health despite Boyd telling her how futile it all was, getting caught up in cataloguing every moment the kid showed some sign of lucidity, before—and she starts weeping at this part—she found Boyd snapping the kid's neck.

Judy wants to believe Christina.

She wants to pull Christina into her arms and comfort her and say that together, they'll find a way to stop all the famine and pestilence and lawlessness. But she knows better. (Christina taught her this lesson the hard way last time, with the Smallpox-ridden bodies of her people strewn across the rubble of the settlement she'd helped build.) So, instead, she shuts down every last empathetic nerve in her body and says coldly, "Boyd was right."

Christina's head snaps up, looking at her with stunned, disbelieving blue eyes. Her voice raw with tears as she gasps, "What? Judy--"

"You may not know it since you don't have to live out here," and oh, it was a struggle to keep her voice hard and unforgiving when Christina flinched, a few tears gliding down those perfect, doll-like cheeks. But Judy's had time enough and experience enough to learn how to be hard and cold in the face of things that would have made her younger self break down completely. "There are no cures. You were only prolonging the kid's death. Boyd gave her peace."

"You're taking Boyd's side?" Christina sounds unfathomably hurt, wrapping her arms around herself tightly as she rocks slightly on the balls of her feet. Judy still can't tell if Christina is being sincere or if this is just another one of Christina's cruel games.

There's only one way to find out, really. Christina at her worst is impatient and lacks any kind of impulse control that she's at least able to fake well enough when she's striving to be good. So, Judy says offhandedly, calculating, "You're right. I'm probably just feeling charitable since he fucked me when he came to see me a few days ago."

"He _what_?!" Christina's pupils flare red, the fire exploding outward in every direction with the force of her rage. The fire doesn't touch Judy. The sparks that come into contact with her skin die out before they can really catch, but Christina's fury makes the flames crawl up the walls and cover the ceiling as if it were coated in gasoline. In the split second it takes Judy to consider whether or not she should attempt to salvage her meager possessions from the flames, the fire flickers out with Christina's figure, leaving only the scent of charred wood and dying embers seeping into Judy's clothing to mark the visit.

Judy can barely remember a time when Christina and the aroma of campfires were linked to pleasant memories.

She knew better than to believe Christina again, but she's still disappointed.

 

iv.

Boyd shows up in the dilapidated library she's taken over two weeks later. Judy is lying on her stomach atop the cracked, scarred vinyl cover of the last standing table in the place, listening to the rain beat down and the wind howl through the broken windows. Her bare feet are stained with mud and grass from the storm outside (she'd given her boots to a survivor thirty miles and three days east) and her threadbare clothes are woefully inadequate for the creeping winter, but she learned long ago that the cold won't kill her. Fashion is hardly a concern when people kill each other for clean drinking water, after all. She doesn't even bother to look away from the tattered, spineless paperback she salvaged from the shelves further in the building as she says, "Whatever you're selling this time, I'm not buying. Tell Christina she's cried wolf too many times now."

"I'm not here for Chris," Boyd replies as the space shifts and shimmers around them, ivory stucco and post-Impressionist art in gilded frames replacing brick walls twined through and cracking with ivy and moss. (She doesn't even want to consider what it means that she knows Boyd well enough to know that he prefers the post-Impressionists.) Again, with the chandeliers, Judy thinks with a sigh as a chocolate veined marble replaces the splintering floorboards, and then her rickety plasterboard table becomes an ornately carved cherry-wood bed frame covered with a thick mattress and a fluffy goose-down comforter.

Boyd has never bothered with subtlety, not with her.

She refuses to admit that the chandeliers make it easier to see the fading print on the pages of her book, carefully turning the page and ignoring him. The windows ripple and the glass spreads in the frames like liquid, hardening whole and unbroken, and the absence of the sounds of the storm is nearly deafening to her as he continues, "She's still a bit… miffed at me. Seems somebody made her think I was playing with her toys without asking first."

And of course _that_ would be why Christina got so outraged, Judy thought. Not the idea of Boyd and Judy as people, but Boyd and Judy as pets, playing together without permission. She gives a passing thought to whether Christina ever found out about the few other times she and Boyd slept together before shaking her head and turning the page over, reading the next sentence three times without registering the words. "And you're just now getting around to whining about it?"

"Took me this long to heal all the broken bones," he trails his fingers along her ankle, tracing the bone up along the muscle of her calf as he pretends to survey the room, making more detailed changes to the paintings and décor while she runs a single finger along the lines of faded newsprint to keep her place. "Arms, legs... spine. Chris is really quite proprietary about you."

Judy sighs, rolling over onto her back and propping herself up on her forearms as she kicks his hand away. Another game, but one she doesn't mind playing; no matter how much she hates him, Boyd is the last little bit of a connection to her life before, that bit before everyone she ever cared about died in agony. She hates him, but she's never quite strong enough to push him away when she's feeling particularly nostalgic. The loose-leaf pages of her book dissolve into the blankets as she shoves them aside, and, even though she should, she doesn't care too much about the way her frayed rags have become something resembling California casual.

(She only had to shoot him once for putting her in lingerie without asking—he hasn't tried it again. Apparently, there are some limits even Boyd won't test after a bullet to the groin.)

"So, you decided since you already served the punishment, why not recreate the crime?"

Boyd doesn't bother to answer, fingers gliding up the sparse hair dotting her legs to press into her hips as he moves over her. His body pushes hers down into the mattress—his mouth against her neck, his hands gliding over the thin layer of skin covering her ribs to her shoulders and arms, under her clothing to press the bare skin of her wrists down into the bed. She moans before she can stop the reaction.

(This is the game: Judy will not give Boyd anything he doesn't drag kicking and screaming from her.)

"I hate you," she breathes, deliberately tearing the buttons off his ridiculously expensive designer shirt. He responds with blunt teeth marking her neck, fingers whispering bruises over her wrists, her hips. "I hate you _so_ much."

"I know," Boyd strips her of the clothes he put her in with little effort, his mouth marking a trail down her body as releases her wrists to grasp her hips. She needs him to hurt her like this every once in a while, to bruise her—the only other thing in the world that leaves marks on her skin is Christina, and they both know it. "But you still want this."

It's sheer force of will that keeps her from calling out his name as she comes.

It doesn't feel like much of a victory.


End file.
